He’s walking rounds in the park when the call comes. They catch up like usual, meandering along familiar routes. What’s expected are her usual ramblings, which he’s learned to endure, if not love, across state lines. Along the way, she tells him that her hens are dead. This surprises him: not their death, but that he is being told a year later.

He senses that she wants to move the conversation forward, as if expecting a lack of warmth and understanding. But something urges him to linger in what was said, to stay in the pocket of the wound. A space opens between them, where grief begins to speak. It tells him of a tumultuous family history, loved ones pulling away, the desire for suicide. It tells him her family had said “they’re just hens” before hanging up the phone.

He’s never inquired about her age before, nor did it ever matter. He knows only that she has lived many lifetimes. What was always apparent was her unbreakable spirit. Even after breaking her spine from a seventy foot fall hiking many years ago, she possessed—was possessed by—a life force akin to faith. Perhaps it was faith. Not the fabricated, untested faith claimed by the religious to numb themselves. But the faith that is the absurdity of a commitment to the impossible, one that acknowledges reason and its limits. The result was the love of her hens, her unwavering joy, her feisty spirit.

She had many things to teach him. When he first moved into her neighborhood, she gave him freshly laid eggs and sprigs of lavender to adorn his empty apartment. On Thanksgiving, when he was alone, she invited him over to share her honeyed yams. She showed him how to knit, years later, which he quickly forgot the motions of as soon as he walked out the door.

But he always remembered her hands. How tough and nimble they looked weaving thread. How familiar they were with the seasons, the earth. They knew the wet, eager root-knot of summer weeds. They knew the cold entrails of northern snow. She taught him that the mind could be untangled through tea and labor. That sometimes, if not often, it needed more than books and guitar strings to know and sustain itself. That there is more to life than a life of the mind. That in fact he might want more than a life of the mind.

When he moved away to the city, she taught him that family could be found, found where he least expected it, found when it was most needed.

He’s never heard her cry before. It nearly breaks him, but she simply gives thanks for the tears. They continue talking, unraveling the weave of a territory long inferred but never spoken into being. The hens are dead. The house is falling apart. Her “family” has abandoned her, again. There is nothing else to live for. Her faith was stitched on the feather of her girls. She wants to follow them, elsewhere, wherever they are.

They were just hens. This is just life.

And yet, and yet…

There they stand, three in a row, feathered

red, pepper and yellow, glistening.

They knew you before you had a name.

They held you even after you lost it.

That pillar of bone that carried you

from west to east, that shattered

under the mar of familiar faces

turned stranger, hostile, gone;

they pieced it back together

with the precision of their beaks,

on wings that lifted you off your bed

into the brightness of your being.

Their calls reminded you you

are needed by the earth, you

are needed full in soul to be

the first everyday to rise

and drink the sun, to greet

the morning as you always have,

to release your three dearest words

into the wild world where we are

waiting: hello good morning,

hello good morning,

hello good morning